the legitimate use of the taxing power. thirdly and most important in the second and third, the second is that john roberts saw health care, as many people saw health care, as the third in a trilogy of cases starting with bush beat gore in 2000, citizens united in 2010, obamacare in 2012 and that, and in those first two cases, you had five republican justices dashing the dream's of democrats in what would seem to many as a very partisan case. as they sat down to vote on health care, it looked like the same thing was going to happen, the five republican nominees were going to trash the democratic dream. roberts recoiled at that idea. roberts has a very keen sense of politics in the larger sense and he knew and cared deeply that the supreme court not be regarded as simply another branch of congress, where democrats and republicans fight. he wanted the court to be seen, if at all possible, as somewhat elevated from that sort of discourse, plus also as has a third reason worth remembering, that republican and conservative agend